Coleridge’s Experimental Poetics

Coleridge has been perceived as the youthful author of a few brilliant poems. This study argues that his poetry is actually a continuous process of experimentation and provides a new perspective on both familiar and unfamiliar poems, as well as the relation between Coleridge's poetry and philosophical thinking.

“All present and future readers of Coleridge’s poetry will be indebted to Mays for having so thoroughly and incisively taken the measure of the language of Coleridge’s poetry … .” (Charles Mahoney, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 58 (1), 2019)"Mays effected a change in our sense of the writer in the way that only a very rare edition can achieve . . . The book is full of perception and wisdom and meditated style. Mays is excellent on the plays, on the epigrams, on the translations. He possesses a vivid and affectionate critical voice of his own." Seamus Perry, The Wordsworth Circle "It is the mark of all great literary criticism that it sends you back to the work it discusses with new eyes and ears, that it is a finger pointing at the moon and not the moon itself. This is exactly what this book achieves. I cannot imagine that anyone would not have their understanding of Coleridge's achievements as a poet both broadened and deepened by reading it . . . this book will provide the interested reader with a whole new insight into the range of his achievement as a poet over a full and long career. You can't ask for more than that from a critic." - Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements "Opting for none of the current modes which seem to constitute current Romantic scholarship fine-grain historicism, book history/networks, late theory Mays' voice is refreshing in being individual and, through a fitting reconciliation of opposites, rather innovative in its very traditionalism." - The Bars Review "This is the most intelligent critical analysis that I've seen in a lifetime of studying Coleridge, a model of the best that literary study can achieve." Jack Stillinger, Center for Advanced Study Professor of English, University of Illinois, USA and author of Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (2006) and two dozen earlier books mostly on Romantic writers "Opting for none of the current modes which seem to constitute current Romantic scholarship - fine-grain historicism, book history/networks, late theory - Mays' voice is refreshing in being individual and, through a fitting reconciliation of opposites, rather innovative in its very traditionalism." Christopher Stokes, The BARS Review

J.C.C. Mays is Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is editor of the Poetical Works volumes in "The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" and has written on and edited a variety of modern, mainly Irish authors.